BACKERS BREW – a Bold Belgian Ale

This brew has been in the making for a while now. Everything started when we asked over 900 brewers & backers of the Brew Journal on Kickstarter “What should we put in a beer?” We got responses from all over the world like chocolate, bacon, cardamom, watermelon, honey, Nelson Sauvin hops… it was hard to choose the right style of beer and a few ingredients we could add to the base recipe.

We stopped by Homebrew Heaven in WA and asked for help. They suggested an APA recipe to start with, but it turned out to be a Bold Belgian Ale. Why Bold? Because of the flavors! Belgian Ales are not beers for any palate to begin with, the spicy notes don’t please everyone. Now, on top of that we added a few things from the list that we gathered from our backers:

Honey

Cardamom

Fresh Ginger

NZ Nelson Sauvin Hops

and… watermelon.. yes…

Honestly, the watermelon doesn’t even come through. Maybe if you add some sort of extract during the bottling, but adding the fruit itself during secondary didn’t do much in this case. Maybe if the watermelon came through it would ruin the flavor, who knows. A watermelon IPA wouldn’t be a bad idea.

We are so pumped to finally release the recipe! Definitely a spring / fall beer because of the cardamom. Just click on the button below to download the Backers Brew!